


Laughing At God

by HollowIsTheWorld



Category: Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Nothing major though, im branching out, minor spoilers for da2 and inquisition, never written for dragon age before
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-13
Updated: 2015-02-13
Packaged: 2018-03-12 04:27:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 875
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3343637
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HollowIsTheWorld/pseuds/HollowIsTheWorld
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alistair knows all about using laughter and jokes as a defense. He laughs to protect himself from insults, from his own insecurities. Cracks jokes when he’s not sure if flirting is right, scoffs to cover up how awful it feels to be left out of where the fighting is thickest. </p><p>Arabelle is the first time he’s ever heard of using laughter as a weapon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Laughing At God

It’s her laugh that sticks in Alistair’s mind. On the lonely nights in the castle when he lays awake, hoping she’ll return to him soon, her laugh echoes around the room. Sometimes he expects to sit up and see her leaning up against the wall, laughing at him for not having seen her before.  

Arabelle laughs like no one Alistair has ever met. She doesn’t chuckle, or giggle, or hide the noise behind her hand with a shy smile. She laughs.

It amazes him, sometimes, just how often she laughs. Arabelle’s lost everything - even more than Alistair. He didn’t really lose the mother he’d never had, or the father, and he didn’t lose a castle full of friends and teachers and familiar faces that will never be replaced, no matter how many years pass.

“I cried at first,” she tells him one night in the camp, somewhere not too far from Orzammar. “Most of the way to Ostagar. Duncan and I barely said two words to each other the whole way, I was crying so hard.”

“How’d you stop?” Alistair asks, thinking about the grief over Duncan and the other Grey Wardens that threatens to eat him alive whenever he’s alone or quiet for too long.

“If I didn’t, Rendon Howe was going to win. He doesn’t get to win. Not after that.”

Alistair knows all about using laughter and jokes as a defense. He laughs to protect himself from insults, from his own insecurities. Cracks jokes when he’s not sure if flirting is right, scoffs to cover up how awful it feels to be left out of where the fighting is thickest.

Arabelle is the first time he’s ever heard of using laughter as a weapon.

It is a weapon though. She laughs at darkspawn in the Deep Roads and it cuts through their ranks like an invisible sword. She laughs when Wynne tells her she’ll slice off her fingers if she keeps twirling her dagger like that, tosses the dagger up, catches it perfectly, laughs again.

Sometimes it bites; sometimes there’s more bite in her laughs than in the sharpest words Alistair has ever heard.

Sometimes it’s sweet, and it rings in his ears like the sweetest lullaby in a hundred different worlds.

She laughs against his mouth sometimes and it seeps between them and then Alistair is laughing too, and there’s never anything else in those moments, just her and him and the pure joy that comes from being in love with her.

She doesn’t laugh when she tells him about Morrigan’s dark ritual. Her face is tight, and he knows, before she tells him, that something’s wrong. He doesn’t want to say yes. He doesn’t want to say yes. But he thinks of her, the archdemon burning through her and making sure she never laughs again. There’s a fear in her eyes, a hitch in her voice, a tension in her hands, and he knows she’s thinking of him falling instead.

Neither of them laugh that night, they grit their teeth and do their duty. Arabelle laughs later though, right in the archdemon’s dead face.

“We didn’t die,” she tells him, breathless, green eyes wide and bright. “They were wrong.”

She laughs in the face of everything that threatens them. She laughs at those who try to tell her to leave him, she laughs at the objections to her ruling at his side, to either of them ruling as Grey Wardens. No one can argue with her when she laughs.

It’s an inviting laugh too. She laughs and the son of the man who slaughtered her family takes up a bow and stands at her side. He’d die for her, it’s etched into his face. Alistair can’t blame him. Arabelle has that effect on people.

Her laugh brings in cloistered sisters and qunari, terrible assassins and responsible mages, drunken dwarves and a giant rock with a hatred of pigeons.

It brings in a mage who starts a war, kills a cleric. She stops laughing when word of the Kirkwall Chantry reaches Denerim. Arabelle stares out a window and says, “He trusted me. I could have done something.”

Alistair holds her and stays quiet. His wife can do anything, he knows, but she can’t do everything. She shouldn’t be expected to.

The cure for the Calling will be the biggest laugh of all, Alistair thinks while he waits for her to return. Breaking the biggest rule of them all, not dying the way all Grey Wardens have died for the last one thousand years.

That’s why he doesn’t pray for her return. It feels blasphemous to pray for her to find a way to beat what plenty probably think is the Maker’s will. Everything’s the Maker’s will if He didn’t spell out how to do it differently.

Maybe it is His will.

Alistair doesn’t care.

An eternity at the Maker’s side isn’t worth the dust he tracks through the throne room when it’s compared to a single minute at her side. She’ll find the cure for the Calling, Alistair has no doubt about that, and when she laughs in the Maker’s face and takes back the life she was robbed of, Alistair will be at her side, and he’ll be laughing too.

 


End file.
